The Quick Find Feature

The Reference Column is convenient, but it seemed to be missing a little something. Looking up things referenced on the current page is all well and good, but what about comparing new things to old things? If the card wasn’t already there, you could try to find it via other cards, but more likely you just left the page. That gave me the idea (which was obvious in hindsight) to add a quick search to the bar.

At first I considered having the search be kind of its own thing, so if you searched for something, it would replace the list with the results. However, that brought up a number of UI questions, so instead when you search for something, it just adds those cards to the current list, and scrolls to the first one. To see further results, just click “Quick Find” (or press enter) again, and it will scroll to each one in turn. These search results are produced the same way as the normal site search, and in the same order, so the best matches should be first.

I am hoping this covers all the obvious uses of the Reference Column. I played through FF1 over the weekend using my walkthrough as a test run, and it seems pretty solid. Of course, I wrote the thing, so I’m still looking for feedback from anyone else who uses this feature. It’s good, but can it be even better?